Everyone has one - that first car you buy with your own money, or at least somebody else's money until you can repay the note, along with considerable interest.

Whether the car is made in Japan or Detroit, there's something truly American about the rite of passage. Our own wheels. Our own freedom. Our own monthly payment.

That first clunker my parents bought for me in high school was important, too, but Sheila was special.

She's the car that drove me to adulthood. That hunk of steel and fiberglass saw me through endless road trips. Her factory radio played the Bob Dylan songs to which I fell in love, and the Leonard Cohen songs to which I fell out.

Together, we got lost, really lost, when people still got lost. Before GPS and Google Maps.

One way or another, Sheila and I found our way.

I don't remember why I called her Sheila. Maybe I was listening to that 1980s hit by Ready for the World. Maybe I happened to be taking special notice of her windshield - shield? Sheila? Maybe she just looked like a Sheila.

She wasn't my dream car. She wasn't anything classic, or flashy, or custom. She was a two-door, 2002 Civic EX - the perfect, no-hassle ride for a 20-something who had no clue how to pop the hood, much less attend to anything under it.

I bought her at a Dallas dealership one afternoon just before a night shift at The Associated Press. Clueless as to how long it takes to buy a car, I was late for work. But time sheets be damned.

Sheila had a sunroof. I was over the moon.

Old reliable

It was baptism by fire for my new ride. In a matter of weeks, she racked up thousands of miles covering forest roads after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East Texas. I was assigned the grim task of reporting on the search for body parts.

Sheila was fine racing down highways or inching along patiently behind lumber trucks. But once, in the muddy perimeter around the Indian Mounds Wilderness, she got stuck. A passer-by in a pickup pulled her out an hour later with a bungee cord I found in my trunk.

In that little car, I did things like hang waist-high out of the sunroof, wind whipping my hair, boyfriend yelling for me to get down, as he negotiated dangerous curves in the Hill Country. I felt like Rose on the bow of the Titanic - "I'm flying!"

Another time, I nearly died. Driving through a sudden downpour one morning in Austin, I hydroplaned on MoPac. Sheila and I slid helplessly in a slow-motion doughnut across several lanes of traffic as oncoming cars roared closer. We landed on the side of the highway, a few feet from one of those hard Jurassic poles that hold exit signs.

She didn't have a scratch, and neither did I.

It wasn't all smooth skidding. Weeks after I drove her off the lot, my clumsy lane change in a downtown Dallas intersection cost her front bumper. When a pickup edged us off a two-lane near my hometown, we off-roaded through a half-mile of grassy ditches until I caught my breath.

She never let me down. And the truth is, I didn't deserve her. I neglected oil changes. I rarely washed her. I once left an egg stain on the driver's side for so long that it became a permanent mark.

Pressed into service

After our first daughter was born, we bought a Subaru that had four doors and room for a car seat. My husband still had his 1997 Mustang, so in my post-partum haze, I let him put Sheila on craigslist. A potential buyer quickly scheduled a time to come see the car, but the guy never showed. I caught a glimpse of a car that slowed as it passed Sheila on the street in front of our house.

Maybe he took one look at that stained paint and changed his mind.

My husband was disappointed. I was relieved. The following Monday, we were both relieved. The Mustang wouldn't start. Sheila was pressed into service once again.

We shared her the next few years, swapping out the Subaru as needed to haul the first kid, and then the second. As I began attending fancy luncheons and elegant banquets, I'd find myself in the valet line next to politicians or celebrities like Matt Schaub.

I half-cringed, half-snickered when the parking attendants brought Old Sheila around. Littered with newspapers inside and glazed in weeks of urban grime, she always turned heads.

Finally, several months ago, we had her serviced. The list of repairs totaled more than it made sense to spend. My husband went out and bought a nice used Toyota. But what to do with Sheila?

On a whim, I offered her to my nephew, who will be driving in a year. My brother-in-law said he knew a mechanic or two who would make the repairs for much less than the dealership quoted.

A few days ago, they headed from Seguin to come get her. I went out to the driveway and looked at her for the first time in weeks, crusted with pecan shells, hood ornament missing, busted tail light from a guy who hit me at a stop sign.

A new owner

I filled two trash bags with old papers, books, Christmas cards and CDs. Then I sat in the driver's seat one last time and remembered the first. Sometimes, I don't know what happened to that carefree 24-year-old. But I know how she got here - in a black coupe with 153,547 miles.

Hours later, my sister sent me a picture of my nephew, a whiz kid band nerd with a hipster haircut, posing next to his new car. He was jokingly singing the song, "Oh, Sheila," my sister texted.

Lisa Falkenberg is the Chronicle’s vice president/editor of opinion. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 20 years’ experience, Falkenberg leads the editorial board and the paper’s opinion and outlook sections, including letters, op-eds and Gray Matters.

Falkenberg wrote a metro column at the Chronicle for more than a decade that explored a range of topics, including education, criminal justice and state, local and national politics. In 2015, Falkenberg was awarded the Pulitzer for commentary, as well as the American Society of News Editors’ Mike Royko Award for Commentary/Column Writing for a series that exposed a wrongful conviction in a death case and led Texas lawmakers to reform the grand jury system. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014.

Raised in Seguin, Texas, Falkenberg is the daughter of a truck driver and a homemaker, and the first in her family to go to college. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. She started her career at The Associated Press, working in the Austin and Dallas bureaus. In 2004, Falkenberg was named Texas AP Writer of the Year.

She joined the Chronicle in 2007 as a roving state correspondent based in Austin.

Falkenberg has mentored journalism students through the Chronicle’s high school journalism program and volunteered with the News Literacy Project. She is a fellow with the British-American Project and has completed a fellowship at Loyola’s Journalist Law School in Los Angeles.